Me, Me, Me, Me, Me

I'm just getting over a weird 24-hour bug, which began in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning, when I awoke to find that someone was stabbing me repeatedly in the upper abdomen. A swift and panicked glance about my darkened bedroom revealed that nobody was, in fact, stabbing me repeatedly in the upper abdomen, and so I lay there deep-breathing for a little bit, then finally managed to fall asleep only to have the whole thing happen again an hour later, like a bad rerun of Real Housewives when you'd been hoping for a new episode.

One of the things I'm trying to work on getting over is my fear of changing in front of other people. Changing clothes, I should clarify. I mean, I'm sure you knew that's what I meant anyway, but now I'm getting a small kick out of the fact that one or two of you perhaps imagined, for a split second, that I was anxious about changing, say, my menu order or my hair color with others present, which sounds like a very severe and specific medical disorder that I most certainly do not have.

I have been feeling unfailingly nostalgic recently. You might argue that I am always unfailingly nostalgic—and it's an argument you'd win; it does seem to be my default state—but I am feeling, I guess, particularly nostalgic as of late. I don't know why. Perhaps it's the wisteria, suddenly out in full force around the buildings at work, and how the scent of it takes me back, like a punch in the gut, to the wisteria that burst into life every spring at school, a riot of purple blooms climbing up the brick between the staff room and the ladies' toilets.

Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, I kept a collection of notebooks in which I wrote down inspirational quotes, song lyrics that seemed impossibly meaningful at the time, and the sort of pensive, doleful observations that prompt in me now a full-body cringe when I remember them. Basically, I had a Tumblr account way before my time.

Oh, I've been meaning to ask you: how was your Presidents' Day? It has not, hitherto, been a day I've ever had off work, and so when Sean and I both realized we had a holiday, we swiftly decided to throw an impromptu brunch, to which Emily Post would be aghast to hear we invited people via text, DM, and Facebook Chat. I know! If a party happens but no-one is around to make custom letterpress invitations, does it really happen? The scandal!

I am of the school of thought that if a song sounds good played once, it sounds even better played ten times in succession. That makes sense, right? Of course it does. I do this with every single song I decide I've fallen in love with, until it is ingrained indelibly on my brain for the rest of my life, and this particular habit of mine is how I still know most of the lyrics to the entire Jon Bon Jovi canon of 1994 to 1995. Hey, I never said it was a useful habit.

December, so far, has been a month for losing things. On Friday morning, for instance, I lost my car keys—or rather I lost my mind, I guess, because I locked my car keys inside my car, where I discovered them an hour later after spending a hitherto pleasant morning meandering around Target. I called Geico, a man showed up in a truck, and I sat there sheepishly with my cart full of paper towels and gingerbread coffee creamer. It wasn't a big deal: twenty minutes lost, maybe. Half an hour.

I went to the dentist yesterday, for an appointment that I had made six months earlier. Does your dentist do this? Make you schedule another appointment the second you walk out of the last one? Probably this is kind of common and everyone's dentist does it, but to me it is newly surprising every time because I cannot think of any other area in my life that is so organized and well-regimented.

Hey, you know what nobody wants to hear about? Your cold. In fact, on the Yeah, Don't Tell Me About That scale, your cold falls somewhere just below that crazy dream you had last night and a mere smidge above a detailed description of whatever you just ate. And by "you" and "your," we are obviously talking about "me" and "my." Nope, I am under no illusion whatsoever that you give any sort of fig (jellied? preserved? fresh from the salad bar at Whole Foods?) about my cold.